Data signals transmitted through a communication network are subject to various distortions caused by the transmission medium or channel. Distortions such as noise, channel fading and multipath may cause errors in decoding a received digital signal. For example, multipath may severely distort or fade a received signal. To mitigate multipath induced distortion, the receiver may utilize receiver diversity, i.e., use multiple antennas to receive multiple versions of a transmitted signal.
The receiver demodulates and decodes the multiple received signals and combines the signals into a suitable format for an appliance such as a television, computer, and the like. To accurately perform such demodulation and decoding, the receiver must provide proper timing recovery of the received signals. However, such timing recovery of multiple signals is difficult in the presence of multipath and channel fading.
Therefore, there is a need in the art to provide a method and apparatus for performing joint timing recovery in a digital receiver using multiple input signals.